And the quest has started ...

What to do when the almost full moon is out, the filter wheel has just broad band filters, and no targets available that would look great in narrowband (it is galaxy season I heard)? Well, open clusters seemed to be an idea, so I looked which ones were visible in the evening hours. And I saw quite a few Messier objects, which made me ask myself: how many do you actually have of this catalog? That actually triggered a wild search over all my data (~30 TB by now). With that, I had to build a master image of all of them, which you can see in Version C.

And the newest member (framed in red in the overall Messier image) is this image of M46, and how happy I was when I saw the unexpected PN that came with it 😊😊. This image is a crop of a much wider field image that includes M47 and some other clusters, and one more PN. This will be shown with the next image, focusing on M47.

The next question came up fairly quickly as well: how do you present an open cluster so that it does not look too boring? Open clusters are definitely one of my favorite visual targets (which I did not do for years now, a shame it is!). They sparkle so nicely through an eyepiece. But can one show this in an image? Well, I fiddled around with this set for quite a while, maybe even longer than some other images that I processed, and that just for stars!! I do not think that one can make them really like a visual image, tried the best though, and with the next open cluster I will try some other methods. For now this should be it. Quite a few more Messiers to go ... but I am confident that I will get them all together one day. My next images will be more of those "boring" ones, but they are definitely worth it.

Exposure times: Another different trial, this time keep the RGB data to 2 minutes, but use 5 minutes for the L channel. I only got 8 of them together, matching the integration time of the color channels. And very honest, without those 5 minute L data the cluster would have been half or less interesting, this produced so many more stars, and they do belong to an open cluster in order to shine.

And one more: In order to pop the stars a little bit more, I used StarSpikesPro for some spikes, yes, those are "fake".

Carpe Noctem!

* This image was not and will not be submitted for IOTD consideration